When the little hand is on the two, and the big hand…

If you are a firmware engineer working on a product that has some kind of online periodic update system, at some point you will have a conversation with your project manager, the subject of the conversation being”What time of day do we *do* this update?” Because updates invariably require reboots and other awkward shenanigans, and who needs that in the middle of their daytime soap opera or fitness run?

The answer will invariably be two-thirty in the morning. If your product does weekly updates, your PM will respond with “Two-thirty every Sunday morning.” [Which you will change to “Two-thirty every *Monday* morning” because your PM really didn’t think about it enough, but you knew what they meant.]

The argument goes: Two-thirty in the morning is a time when all sensible and God-fearing people (and especially technology review editors) should be tucked away in bed. Thus, no one will notice just one appliance going offline for a minute or two while it reflashes its firmware. And no other company is going to do the same thing to *their* products at that crazy hour, it’s just so *unlikely*. Two-thirty AM sounds great, let’s ship it. It’ll be our secret.

Cut-to: I am insomniac again. Minding my own business at Something-Dark-Thirty in the morning and doing some reading. Okay, I’m watching Firefly again, sue me.

The TV stutters for a second or two, then goes black and displays “Rebooting, please wait”. The microwave oven emits a “beep” and starts doing something awful and herky with its LEDs. My watch buzzes and shows a spinning whooshie graphic while it messes with its own insides. Everything is displaying progress bars and “percentage complete” counters and little apologetic messages that betray the same sad trains of thought. All the widgets in my living room are emitting little boops and beeps to announce that they have upgraded their brains and jumped off the cliff into next week’s firmware, to better our lives with bug fixes and shiny, new buggy features. Even the damned toaster is getting into the act. Why would a toaster need a firmware update?

Some of the devices don’t come back to life. Maybe there’s a hardware failure, or an overworked software guy flubbed a semicolon in the update code and now that company has catapulted half a million of its heavily advertised Internet of Things devices into the category of Internet of Dead-Ass Bricked E-Waste. People find these little corpses in the morning, like poor little rodents discovered by the cat. It’s highly likely that the company that made these benighted devices will become a corpse, too, which is why wise companies feed and train their firmware engineers with care. Right?

O, this brave new world of embedded, connected systems. Kind of like the old world, but I sure hope you’re running version 2.01a, because unless you have that latest patch . . .

Intertubes of ThingsCat monitor, coffee grinder It sends email, too.

Let us not speak about devices that are designed to listen to you all the time. It is just too early in the morning for that amount of trust.